Trailing Brigadier (retired) Thenphunga Sailo, the second chief
minister of Mizoram, from Aizawl to Lunglei as a journalist during the
elections, was an experience. In the blue Mizo hills, the chief minister
moved in a cavalcade of vehicles, the most striking of which was an
LMG-mounted Jeep with a security jawan standing up, keeping an alert eye
on the road. It was during the 1984 assembly election in Mizoram, then a
Union territory affected by the armed insurgency of the Mizo National
Front led by Pu (Mr) Laldenga, formerly a non-combatant havildar in the
Indian army.

I had come to know Sailo, who passed away in an Aizawl hospital on
Friday at the age of 93. Learning that I came from Bihar, he talked of
being stationed at the Danapur Cantonment, not far from Patna, during
his years in the army. He had successfully organised flood relief
operations in the state.

Sailo had served in the British Indian army, having been recruited as
a second lieutenant in 1942. The decorated officer retired from the
Indian army in 1974. It was while I was trailing him that he talked
about his experience in the armed forces and promised to give me a copy
of the report of the human rights committee he had set up when I
returned to Aizawl. The committee had listed 36 cases of violation by
the security forces during the eight years of insurgency in the Mizo
hills, which had been forwarded to then prime minister Indira Gandhi.

He kept his promise and gave me a copy of the report. It could have
been one of the first instances of a former senior army officer seeking
an inquiry into the atrocities committed by the security forces. Today,
41 years later, he would have found many supporters across the country
for his campaign.
He had made an impassioned appeal to Indira Gandhi for a judicial
commission of inquiry to “verify the truth” of the sound cases. In his
letter to the PM, dated October 10,1974, the retired officer had said,
“I have been increasingly depressed and perturbed as a soldier with 31
years of service at the reputation of the Indian army, in which I still
feel so proud to have served… I am not given to irresponsible or
emotionally hasty judgements nor to magnifying occasional unfortunate
incidents into a general complex of bitterness”. To prove his point,
Sailo wrote, “Some years ago when there was indiscipline amounting to
mutiny among some troops from my own state and regiment, I was the first
to depreciate leniency”.

“I am not squeamish about inevitable causalities that occur in combat
with the underground hostiles,” he had claimed in the same letter,
poignantly adding, “But the feelings of the entire village population of
Mizoram are now totally alienated by what amounts to the denial of all
decencies of human rights”. He had urged that something had to be done
to bridge the gulf and restore confidence and that was the reason for
setting up the committee. He had appealed to the PM’s “impartiality and
understanding”, instead of taking up any “destructive or agitational
approach”. In his letter, significantly from the “Ahimsa Cabin”, the
retired officer had said, “We do not seek any vindictive punishments —
merely that justice and decency be restored and fear of terror, torture
and oppression is lifted from the hearts of our people”. The committee’s
report had a three-page preface with the title “Civil-military
relationship in Mizoram and the image of Indian army in Mizoram”.

Forwarding the report, he had mentioned that the image of the Indian
army had reached its “bottom” and touchingly said, “Mizo is in my blood
and the Indian army is in my flesh and bones.”

The writer is a former Northeast correspondent of ‘The Indian Express’ who was based in Shillong